The peripheral blood transcriptome identifies dysregulation of inflammatory response genes in polycystic ovary syndrome

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common endocrine disorder in women resulting in ovulation failure and other metabolic problems. However, the underlying mechanisms of it remain largely uncertain due to its complexity of clinical manifestations. Since PCOS is believed as a systemic disorder involved endocrine, metabolism, immune system and many organs, we therefore want to know what happen in the peripheral blood of patients with PCOS. To this purpose, gene expression patterns of peripheral blood from 10 PCOS patients and 10 healthy women were profiled by microarray. The significance analysis of microarray (SAM) software was employed to screen the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and gene ontology (GO) was used for functional enrichment analysis. Also, quantitative reverse-transcription PCR (qRT-PCR) was performed to confirm the results from microarray. 181 DEGs with a fold change >2.0 and q-value <0.05 were identified between the groups. Of these genes, 149 were up-regulated and 32 down-regulated in PCOS. Importantly, 14 genes associated with inflammatory response pathway were highly enriched in PCOS. Furthermore, qPCR assays validated the dysregulated inflammatory response genes. Our observation reinforces the hypothesis that PCOS is characterized by the presence of systemic inflammatory changes and inflammation is implicated in the pathogenesis of this entity. Further elucidation of the aberrant expression of inflammation-related genes how to affect the pathogenesis of PCOS may lead to the development of novel preventative and therapeutic strategies. The dual-color approach was adopted in our study, 8 PCOS samples and 8 healthy controls labeled with Cy3, pooled control labeled with Cy5 , respectively.